Detroit's student of pop lands in town to fly solo

Marshall Crenshaw forgot to bring his pork-pie hat but not his guitars, writes Bernard Zuel.

As a Detroit pre-teen in the early '60s, Marshall Crenshaw used to wait for his cousin Marilyn to come home each week with a new batch of 45s by bands such as the Beatles.

Already a fan of Buddy Holly and other early rock figures, he was beginning to devour pop music in all its forms, the music that would inform his own songwriting eventually.

A decade or so later he was playing one of those Beatles, John Lennon, on stage eight times a week in the show Beatlemania, and a decade after that he added Buddy Holly to his resume when he played the bespectacled Texan in the film La Bamba.

Funnily enough, though, quietly and almost by the back door, after a career dotted with appearances as venerable rock figures, at the age of 50 Crenshaw suddenly finds himself as one of those venerable rock figures.

He's been making albums since his self-titled debut in 1982 (made at what seems, in today's post-Silverchair/Britney years, the almost ancient age of 28), releasing new batches of songs that mixed pop, rock and soul, and occasionally even samba, at regular intervals up to this year's What's In The Bag. If you don't know his recordings of near perfect pop songs such as Someday, Someway and Cynical Girl (both from his debut) you'd know Bette Midler's version of You're My Favourite Waste Of Time or the Gin Blossoms' hit Til I Hear It From You.

When he wasn't recording Crenshaw might have been found helping curate a reissue of one of the great Detroit albums, Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On, writing on pop and jazz or producing a book on pop music in the cinema.

"I'm not at all as ravenous a consumer [of music] as I used to be, no way," Crenshaw says, weary but wired after a 28-hour flight that landed him in Sydney on a cold morning earlier this week.

"There was a time when I would go out every week and buy NME, read it cover to cover to find out what was cool and new. I'm still enthusiastic about music but I'm not so up to the minute with pop music. But really like the age that I am now, I'm really comfortable with myself and I don't have any complaints about not being 28 any more. Maturity agrees with me."

I suggest that, like me, he probably has thousands of albums, singles and tapes all over the house.

"Yeah, and I'm kinda tired of having all of them," Crenshaw confesses. "Now I'm at the point where I see all this stuff I have and think 'why?"'

Because boys collect stuff.

"I'm really fighting with myself to get rid of some of it," he sighs. "Or most of it, or all of it."

The collection, the books, the lingering passion suggest that not only is he a fan but he's almost a student, if not a scholar of the form.

"It's just a mental quirk I have that I remember all this stuff. I don't really know why I can name all the members of Gerry and the Pacemakers but I don't know my passport number."

Of course I have to test him on that claim, and, despite his protestations that the flight has dulled his brain, he takes a breath and rattles the names off.

"Freddie Marsden was the drummer, the piano player was Les McGuire, the bass player was Les Chadwick and Gerry Marsden. It's ridiculous, isn't it?"

My Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll has Chadwick listed as John but Crenshaw counters: "You know, they might be wrong." And, in a way, they are. Chadwick was born John Leslie but was known as Les.

For his next party trick, Crenshaw, who has just spent five weeks as the hired-hand guitarist in Detroit's original agitpop-and-soul rockers, MC5, and spent the first two decades of his career in a cast or band, will play a show in Sydney armed only with electric guitars and his now trademark pork-pie hat.

Well, almost. "I've got to go and buy one. I came here without a hat," he admits. "I like to wear a hat when I go to work: it puts me in a showbiz frame of mind."